Future. Meaning and Form (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,1, University of Innsbruck, course: Language Awareness 3, language: English, abstract: This Proseminar paper is about "Future - Meaning and Form", following the presentation held in the Awareness III. course in winter term 2007/08. In order to analyse the different forms and meanings of the various future concepts, there are several English Grammar books providing useful theoretical information.
The first part of the paper serves as a theoretical overview. In this section the different future concepts are analysed and the meaning of the different tenses is dissected. The second part consists of the practical part. It illustrates where and why the different future concepts are used in different examples. It also shows how the rules in the theoretical part apply to the practical examples like dialogues and full texts.

In English, like in all Germanic languages, there is no simple future tense. The futurity of an action is expressed either by using a word which expresses a future action, e.g. I drive to London in two days, or by utilising an auxiliary construction that combines a definite present tense verb with the stem of this verb which illustrates the actual action of the sentence.
The English future tense was established during the period of 300 years, between 1066 and 1350. During that time, Anglo-Norman was the official language of the British Isles. Unlike English, Norman is a Romance Language, which does have a simple future tense.
In the course of the study of the English future concepts, one has to make a difference between spoken and written language. As spoken language is used more often than written language, the used future tense differs.